Take a second and it's back to the start. Then fighter pilots start harassing you, trying to take you down. And just wait until you get to the water.Īt one point the ceiling becomes a wormhole, and moving through it will see you pop up from a different place on the screen. Soon though there are cannons spewing fireballs, saw blades that bounce from the floor, and towers that blast out a stream of plasma which tracks your movement. But with each new area, a new dynamic is introduced.Īt first you'll be weaving in and out of gaps edged with spikes - the usual fare. Especially when you take into consideration that many levels will be played over as you die and get thrown back to the start. As each level is basically an auto scroller, time is of the essence, and your reaction times need to be short and sharp.įor the first few minutes you'd be forgiven for thinking that things are going to get repetitive. Juggle itĪtomik: RunGunJumpGun becomes a precise juggling act of shooting in two directions to allow our scavenger protagonist to nimbly move around the screen. The interesting dynamic here, though, is when you're firing forward, you can't hover. You don't have to collect all of the atomiks in each level, but gaining a specific amount will unlock the next world. You have to travel from the start of the level to the end, dodging obstacles and collecting atomils, if you choose to. Jumping is assigned to the L button, shooting to the R button. The mechanics, at first, are exactly the same as Jetpack - hold a button to blast streams of bullets into the floor and hover. Bravo.It would be an incredible disservice to Atomik: RunGunJumpGun if I were to compare it to Jetpack Joyride, but it's the first thing anyone will think when the game starts. Mainly, though, it's special because it gives me just too much to think about, so when I play it I am at war not just with the game, but with myself. It's suitably brutal, too, punishing me ceaselessly because it knows it can also offer me a near-instant restart. It's suitably lurid with migrainey colour schemes and a bizarre comic sci fi plot. The endless runner has never gone away, of course - Nintendo's just announced its own - and there are many I've loved since Canabalt, but RunGunJumpGun is special. (I have, of course, forgotten what these doodads are called.)Īll of which, thrown together, makes RunGunJumpGun an absolute delight to play: endless drama, frustration and self-hatred that I haven't really known since the glory days of Canabalt. To really thrive in RunGunJumpGun, you need to collect the little doodads scattered around each level, often in hard-to-reach places. It's not enough to simply survive - to eke out a kind of life by leaping over spikes, but not so high that you leap up into different spikes, and by blasting away at barrels that would otherwise leave you squished on geometry. Ulp! And it's bad news for me again, because to play RunGunJumpGun well, you really need to be able to remember three things. That said, it's also good news for me, because it means I can just about play RunGunJumpGun, a 2D autorunner game in which you have two controls: you can shoot your gun downwards to give you some lift, and you can shoot it forwards to blow up things that are ahead of you. I say it's something like that, because I've forgotten. This is bad news for me, because the actual number of things you're meant to be able to remember is something like seven (+/-two). I can remember two things at the same time, and I can just about switch between them if I absolutely have to. How many things can you remember at once? I know the answer when it comes to me! It's two.
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